Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Hooray! I survived surgery! I currently have four weeks of neurology in Detroit. In honor of my new rotation, I knew what I had to do: brain cupcakes!

Brain cuppies have been done before. Even Martha Stewart has a recipe for brains! I made her one bowl chocolate cupcakes. Wow, why aren't all cupcake recipes one bowl? Much less cleanup! What I liked about these cupcakes is that they rose into a nice dome shape, perfect for brains!

I had a bad frosting day the day I made these cupcakes. I tried two times (!) to make some swiss meringue buttercream. That is EIGHT sticks worth of butter. Each time the frosting curdled and had to be scraped. Ugh! It drives me crazy when a recipe that I have made before with ease doesn't go my way. In fact, I was so annoyed and tired afterwards that I didn't even want to take hundreds of pictures of my cuppies.

Oh well, I had to settle for making up my own brain frosting... I just used a good 'ol vanilla buttercream frosting and added some combination of black, pink, and orange food gel coloring to create a pale pink/grey "brain matter" frosting.

Obviously, these were not anatomically correct brains, but they were good enough for the neurology clerkship director!

Here's how you can make your own brain cupcakes. Use a small round tip, like Wilton #12.

1. Take a single cupcake

2. Optional - cover with a thin layer of seedless strawberry jam. It not only gives a hint of fruit to your cupcake, but makes it more gory. And slimy.

3. If your cupcakes are not dome shaped, pile on a mound of frosting to make it dome shaped. Otherwise, just pipe a single line down the center of the cupcake.

Notice how awesome (gross?) it looks with the jam layer

4. Pipe around the entire outside of the cupcake and fill in each side with gyri and sulci. Ok, actually you will just be making squiggles with the frosting.

It takes some practice to get brains that you are happy with. The good thing is that if you don't like the way they look, you can just eat them and fulfill your zombie fantasy.

However, if I were going to be a zombie, it would be more like this. Mmm... Zombie Darcy....